Affiliate marketers are the fuel to your business’s fire. They increase visibility of your offers, gain larger volumes of traffic, and ultimately add to your revenue. At the end of the day, affiliates bring in more profit with less effort on your part. And if managed well, this powerful strategy is very cost-effective!
One of the best ways to recruit high-performing affiliates is with a killer affiliate tools page. This page is where affiliate marketers will decide “Yes I want to promote this” or “No way I’m promoting this…”. It is your first impression. Not only does this page recruit new, quality affiliates, but it’s also the one-stop-shop for all materials and resources they’ll need to promote your offer easily and effectively.
Affiliates’ Performance = Your Profit
Set your affiliates (and ultimately yourself) up for success by creating an attractive, informational, and thorough tools page.
We’re giving you the top 5 things to include on your affiliate tools page to maximize how successfully affiliates promote your offer, gain new ones in the process, and scale your business to new heights.
Remember, affiliates aren’t doing this just for fun; they’re doing it for a living. The amount of commission you’re offering will be one of the first things affiliates look for when visiting your tools page. You should be prepared to offer competitive commission rates for their efforts. I like to call this “suffish- commish”, mostly because it sounds cool.
Our Business Development Manager, Thomas McMahon, is a huge advocate for utilizing an affiliate network. But he knows the importance of rewarding affiliates to keep them happy and keep them coming around! His tip?
We get it, you need to make a buck too. We’re not suggesting you give 100% commission across your entire funnel. You could offer one commission rate through the entire funnel, or you could offer different rates on different products occurring at different points in your funnel.
Now, a lot of factors contribute to how you price your commission rates. A higher ticket price tends to allow for some wiggle room, but 75% commissions seems to be a solid average. And who knows, maybe you do throw in an offer with 100% commission as a sweet little treat.
Funnel maps help both affiliates and vendors understand the buying process for the end consumer. It provides a great visual representation of your front end offers, upsells, and downsells.
We took a look through the ClickBank Marketplace to find examples of effective funnel maps. Check out a few of the following. These three maps highlight key elements that make up a valuable funnel map:
- The frequency of the charge for each offer
- For example: $47/month, $197/year
- The commission rate on each offer and maybe even the exact amount they will earn
- For example: Price: $97, Commission Rate: 75%, You Earn: $72.75
- If the offer is front end, upsell, or downsell
- The name of each offer
This first one comes from BeIrresistible’s Dating and Relationship offer on ClickBank, His Secret Obsession. Notice that affiliates will know exactly how much they’ll earn from each offer.
This next one is from Reading Head Start, a children’s education offer. This map is clean and attractive. You can clearly see the price and commission rate for each product.
This last funnel map comes from Love Learnings which has multiple Dating and Relationships offers on ClickBank. This map makes it easy to understand the frequency of the charge for each product so affiliates know they’ll make recurring commissions!
By providing promotional materials for your affiliate, you are not only providing materials that you know work, but you’re also making it easier for the affiliate to get started. The easier it is for an affiliate to get started, the more likely they are to promote you.
Another benefit of providing promotional materials is that it allows you to protect the integrity of your brand and products.
An affiliate can unintentionally misrepresent your brand or promote your offers to the wrong crowd. You’ve worked hard for this product and deserve to have it shared in the best possible way.
Here are a handful of helpful promotional materials you could provide to set the standard for your offer and aid your affiliates on their mission to success:
- Landing Pages
- Images
- Relevant Audiences + Keywords
- Email Swipes
- Hoplink Samples
Landing Pages
Allow your affiliates to see the landing pages and fully understand the offer. The more familiar they are, the more prepared they will be. By providing the landing pages of your offers, you’ll also further ensure brand continuity through each affiliate as they are more likely to match the look, tone and feel of those pages.
Images
Remember, its all about ease! Providing images for your affiliates reduces their need to hunt the web, contact you, make their own, or give up on your offer all together. This could include brand or product logos, product images, banner ads, etc.
Be Finally Fit, a weight-loss offer on ClickBank, has an incredible affiliate tools page with just about everything an affiliate would need to successfully promote the offer. Take a look the different product images they provide.
They provide images for each of the e-book covers throughout the entire funnel.
They offer images for all other components of the offers like the meal plans, 1-on-1 coaching, even bonuses!
Also provided are different dimensions of banner ads for placements on websites, social media, or wherever the affiliate may wish to place ads.
Additionally, BeFinallyFit provides logos of their brand for affiliates to use as needed.
Relevant Audience
You are the product owner. You know who this offer is for and you know what audience it works best with. When you wrote the copy, what demographic were you writing to? Was it new moms looking to lose the baby weight? Was it middle-aged men getting back into the dating scene?
Empower your affiliates with this critical information, don’t leave it to them to guess. Ensure your product is put in front of the right eyes by letting them know your target demographic.
This is another element that Love Learnings’s affiliate tools page does well.
Secret Affiliate, a BizOpp/Internet Marketing offer on ClickBank provides another great example by telling them exactly which niche this offer works in.
And Reading Headstart tells affiliate the exact demographic that is interested in their product.
Email Swipes
Guarantee open rates and click through rates by writing the emails for your affiliates!
Picture this: You’ve created a kick ass product. You’ve got a gorgeous landing page and high-quality funnel. You are positive that you’ve crushed this one and everybody who sees it is going to love it.
If your affiliates aren’t equipped with converting subject lines, strong copy, and accurate audience details then customers may not even make it to your funnel.
Providing email swipes is also another effective way for you to control the show and save your affiliates time. This may sound laborious, but you’ll find it to be a labor of love that will pay off in the long run.
Check out some of the examples of provided email swipes below. Consider including an email for each product you’re offering, a suggested email sequence, and even suggested cadence.
Secret Affiliate provides many email swipes for their affiliates to use and edit as needed.
Bioptimize, a brand that offers many different health supplements through ClickBank, also provides a good example of different email swipes for their affiliates.
And Love Learnings at it again!
HopLink Samples/Generators
Remember, your tools page should be an easy one-stop-shop. Affiliates can’t promote anything without a Hoplink, so including a Hoplink sample to get them started is a great idea!
You’ll see in the examples below that you simply provide the Hoplink for the specific product and designate the portion the affiliate will plug their ClickBank ID into.
One helpful thing we’ve seen vendors do is build a Hoplink generator that creates the link for the affiliate. Now, building a Hoplink generator may require some savvy tech skills on your back-end. But like your email swipes, this labor of love brings an affiliate one easy step closer to promoting you.
Critical Bench, a Health and Fitness brand, has many offers on ClickBank and their affiliate tools page includes Hoplinks for each product.
Bioptimize has a Hoplink generator but also provides pre-made Hoplinks for each product.
BeFinallyFit also provides Hoplink samples for each product and a Hoplink generator.
PRO TIP:
You have the ability to Whitelist Affiliates, meaning they need to apply to promote you and you must approve them before they can.
You also have the ability to Blacklist affiliates that have already proven to be harmful to your business.
To request either of these features, you can email support@clickbank.com .
Like I said, affiliate marketers aren’t just doing this for fun. They’re doing this for a living and rely on this income. They’re already motivated to make the sales but they need to know their efforts will pay off. The kind of affiliates you want to attract are not going to scale your offer unless it converts. So prove it!
By now, you should have already tested your offer. You should have a baseline of how it performs and a good idea of the product’s rates. Show these off. Let affiliates know that this offer has a low refund rate. Let them know it’s been tested and proven to convert with cold traffic, warm traffic, both. Let them know the average EPC and conversion rate. Healthy rates also act as a great recruiter for new affiliates that are hungry for a well-converting offer.
Look at a few examples.
If your affiliates have any questions, they should be able to contact you or an affiliate manager for a reliable, timely answer. You should provide, at a minimum, an email address they can reach you at, but providing a phone number or a Skype contact doesn’t hurt.
This is also a great opportunity to collect your affiliates’ information. Have them opt-in or apply to promote you so you can collect their emails and contact them with contests, problems, or when you want to encourage them to promote more!
Affiliates are your partners and you guys are a team. Make them feel this way. This little bit of support is wildly encouraging and makes them feel like they have a more personal, valuable connection with you, which will only inspire them to do their absolute best work.
Cody Bramtlett of Science Natural Supplements does a great job at making his affiliate feel like his teammate with plenty of avenues to contact him.
Conclusion
A killer affiliate tools page is the best way to recruit new, high-quality affiliates and ensure those affiliates show up and convert. By providing marketing materials, competitive commission rates, and good support, your affiliates will be well prepared to rake in profits for the both of you. Create your new, effective affiliate tools page and start making bank today!
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